Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Ya'alon said Sunday that Judge Richard Goldstone should request a UN retraction of his report on Operation Cast Lead, Army Radio reported. "There is no doubt that great damage was caused by the report, it is not less than blood libel," Ya'alon said, adding that "it became fixed in Western minds that Israel indiscriminately kills civilians."

Speaking at the opening of the weekly cabinet meeting, Netanyahu said he had asked the various ministries to "formulate practical and public diplomacy measures, in order to reverse and minimize the great damage that has been done by this campaign of denigration against the State of Israel."

Goldstone, in an op-ed Friday in the Washington Post
op-ed, said that if he had all the information available today at the time he
wrote his report on Operation Cast Lead, that it would have been a
completely different document. He said that it is now clear Israel did
not have a policy of targeting civilians and that Hamas clearly
continues to commit war crimes.

Addressing Goldstone's reversal, President Shimon Peres said that the
retired South African jurist should apologize to the State of Israel for
accusing it of war crimes during Operation Cast Lead, Israel Radio
reported on Sunday.

"Goldstone ignored the central reason for the
IDF operation in Gaza," Peres said, "the firing of thousands of rockets
at innocent Israeli citizens."

He added that the IDF acted in self defense, investigated its own
actions and will continue to be one of the most moral armies in the
world.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that the regret expressed by Richard
Goldstone over his report was "too limited, and comes too late,"
reported Army Radio on Sunday.

According to the report, Barak said the damage caused by the Goldstone report could not be undone.

"The state of Israel announced that the report was fundamentally
distorted. The Goldstone commission was based, from the beginning, on
blood libels. It did not pretend to determine whether there were in
fact war crimes, but in advance meant to determine which war crimes that
Israel allegedly led."

Barak also explained the Israeli decision not to cooperate with the
Goldstone commission, saying "Goldstone wanted us to give him facts,
however we didn't have facts, because at the time we hadn't conducted
our own investigation."

Added Barak, "there is no basis to the claim that Israel kept
information from the committee, to the contrary- we submitted a report
consisting of hundreds of pages that brought forth our opinions on every
incident. The committee took our report into its hands, and instead
used the our arguments against us."

Barak concluded, "every country would have acted like Israel did if an international body came and blamed it."

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said that the steadfastness of Israel
to its goals of justice and its willingness to pay the price caused
Richard Goldstone to change his conclusions, in an interview on Israel
Radio on Sunday.

The foreign minister asserted that if Israel had cooperated with
Goldstone's investigation, it would have set a dangerous precedent. He
added that he doesn't want an apology from Goldstone. He did, however,
continue his attack on Israeli left-wing organizations, "primarily the
New Israel Fund," who he claimed gave information against Israel to the
Goldstone Commission.

US ambassador Michael Oren on Saturday said that the Goldstone report "must be utterly discredited," in light of the Washington Post op-ed.

"In this article, Judge Goldstone contrasts the deliberate targeting of
civilians by Hamas and its refusal to investigate its own war crimes
with Israel's efforts to avoid civilian casualties and to fully
investigate charges of IDF misconduct. Unfortunately, Judge Goldstone
reached these conclusions only now, after his report seriously impaired
the ability of Israel--and of all democratic states--to defend
themselves, and furnished a major victory for terror," Oren stated.